Garden Gallery

The Garden Gallery at the Farm at the Arb is a “story garden” — a living exhibit where we invite community partners from outside the Arboretum to share their stories through plants. These curators design the garden with the plants that tell their story — in the process, elevating voices from communities that are historically overlooked by botanical gardens.

2024 Seeds of Knowledge & Healing

This year, the Arboretum’s community partner is Zongxee Lee, who comes from a long line of Hmong herbalists, or healers. Through this living exhibit, she is telling the story of how her family came to the U.S. after the Vietnam War, bringing precious medicinal herbs with them, and how they have been keeping these herbs and their medicinal traditions alive in Minnesota.

Even though these herbs are central to Hmong healing practices, very little is known about the botany or taxonomy of these plants. Zongxee has been working with UMN researchers to sequence the DNA of each herb to identify the scientific classification of these plants. (Plant taxonomy is the science that finds, identifies, describes, classifies and names plants.)

Visitors can learn about Zongxee’s story by visiting the Garden Gallery at the Farm at the Arb. There is a storywalk made up of five signs around the perimeter of the garden, so they can walk around the garden and learn about the story in five parts while viewing the plants. See below for images of the five signs.

A Hmong Botanical Garden

The garden contains 12 of the most important Hmong chicken soup herbs, as well as other plants that Zongxee has chosen to represent Hmong culture, including rice, Hmong vegetables and flowers. This living exhibit will be up throughout the growing seasons of 2024 and will be replanted in 2025.

To learn more about Hmong culture in Minnesota and the Hmong Diaspora from Asia after the Vietnam War, please refer to the Minnesota Historical Society, or ask a librarian in the Andersen Horticultural Library how to find resources on this topic from other University of Minnesota libraries.

See the map for the exact location of the Garden Gallery.

Garden Gallery

A Hmong Botanical Garden

The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum serves as a research center and extension of the University of Minnesota's College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS).

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